RAVES SURVIVING ON FALSE ECSTASY

There was a double stabbing in Toronto on Friday night and hardly anyone
seemed to notice.

According to the police report, a group of males forced their way into the
SPACE nightclub on Yonge St., confined the security staff at gunpoint, and
became involved in several attacks, which resulted in injuries to two
patrons.

One teenager was stabbed in the chest and wound up in intensive care.
Another was treated in hospital and released. A machete and a metal pipe
were seized by police.

Three men were charged with attempted murder, assault causing bodily harm,
aggravated assault and assault with a weapon.

And not a word about any of this made its way to the newspapers or the
nightly news. Just another Friday night story from another Toronto rave.

No shots were fired, no drug arrests were made, no one was killed. No reason
to get all hot and bothered.

Except there is reason.

The minute we become desensitized to the controversial rave culture, we all
lose something. The minute we start saying 'So what?' every time there is
another stabbing, another drug bust, another outbreak of violence, we are
all but advocating a frightening status quo.

This isn't, as some rave supporters have suggested, like the beginnings of
rock 'n' roll music, when society tried to shut down Elvis Presley because
of how he swivelled his hips. This isn't historical at all. This is about
unsupervised teenagers, with access to drugs, few rules and no perspective:
A 9-1-1 call waiting to happen.

And in the past year alone, stabbings, shootings, drug-overdoses. Some
party.

If you want insight into the rave culture, away from the highly politicized
tones of this city, a recent New York Times Magazine piece written by Amy
Jenkins offers a startling view of the rave world from her own personal
experiences. She described her vast, enticing and troubled experiences from
her four years as a regular rave-goer.

What raves may have started out to be in the late 1980s -- as a place to
dance, as a place for alternative music, as a nightclub for those underage,
as an expression of youth -- rapidly changed over time. The music was there
and the dance was still there, but the drug culture has increased
dramatically.

"It was all about being happy and being together," Jenkins wrote in The New
York Times Magazine. "People smiled at each other and people even hugged
each other -- it really was an incredible atmosphere.''

An atmosphere fuelled by the drug Ecstasy, the same drug that killed Allen
Ho in Toronto last October. A drug Jenkins grew quite familiar with.

"The music which before was good, became just unbelievable -- you somehow
hear it in a way you don't when you're straight ... It was a very druggy
scene, and the good times equalled what drugs we were going to have, but E
was the one I really liked because it made me feel happy...

"It got to a point where I wasn't remotely interested in anything going on
in the world. I vaguely remember seeing something about the Berlin Wall on
TV, but I just wasn't interested. Not interested in anything except where
the next party was going to be ...

"You can't do E twice a week and it not start to have a negative effect.
It's a very strong drug. Coming down from E is horrendous -- you have the
most terrible hangovers, which go beyond just feeling physically enervated.
You feel depressed, really bleak, like your life's going nowhere and you
can't cope."

You don't hear anything like that when you listen to the rave defenders
today. You hear about adult overreaction. You hear about police
exaggeration. You hear about a few arrests and so many customers.

You don't hear about the victims who aren't arrested, who aren't shot, who
don't overdose, who are simply overcome by the culture.

That's why you can't be ambivalent.

That's why you can't shrug your shoulders or turn the page or miss the news
altogether when there's another rave arrest.

"It was quite a dangerous world, like a harsh school playground where there
aren't any rules to back it up, because you were outside the ambit or normal
social structure," Jenkins, now 33, wrote. "It was partly an illusion, that
togetherness thing, and it could crack, and when it cracked it could be
quite nasty."